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Lingyong Yan

24 accepted papers

2026

Facial-R1: Aligning Reasoning and Recognition for Facial Emotion Analysis

AAAI 2026technical

Facial Emotion Analysis (FEA) extends traditional facial emotion recognition by incorporating explainable, fine-grained reasoning. The task integrates three subtasks—emotion recognition, facial Action Unit (AU) recognition, and AU-based emotion reasoning—to jointly model affective states. While re

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

DRBO: Mitigating the Bottleneck Effect via Dynamic Reward Balancing in Multi-reward LLM Optimization

EMNLP 2025

In the current landscape of large language models (LLMs), many evaluation metrics have been developed and used as rewards during training to improve specific metrics. However, balancing these metrics and dynamically adjusting reward weights remains challenging, as current approaches often fail to en

2025

Divide-Then-Aggregate: An Efficient Tool Learning Method via Parallel Tool Invocation

ACL 2025long

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities, their ability to autonomously execute complex real-world tasks remains limited. Accordingly, tool learning has emerged to enable LLMs to effectively leverage external tools to extend their capabilities. Current tool-learning par…

2025

Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2025poster

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely utilized to incorporate external knowledge into large language models, thereby enhancing factuality and reducing hallucinations in question-answering (QA) tasks. A standard RAG pipeline consists of several components, such as query rewriting, document r…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

Iterative Self-Incentivization Empowers Large Language Models as Agentic Searchers

NeurIPS 2025poster

Large language models (LLMs) have been widely integrated into information retrieval to advance traditional techniques. However, effectively enabling LLMs to seek accurate knowledge in complex tasks remains a challenge due to the complexity of multi-hop queries as well as the irrelevant retrieved con…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

MACPO: Weak-to-Strong Alignment via Multi-Agent Contrastive Preference Optimization

ICLR 2025poster

As large language models (LLMs) are rapidly advancing and achieving near-human capabilities on specific tasks, aligning them with human values is becoming more urgent. In scenarios where LLMs outperform humans, we face a weak-to-strong alignment problem where we need to effectively align strong stud…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via Entity-Centric Multimodal Preference Optimization

EMNLP 2025

Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across multiple tasks. However, their trustworthiness is often challenged by hallucinations, which can be attributed to the modality misalignment and the inherent hallucinations of their underlying Large Language Models (

2025

PA-RAG: RAG Alignment via Multi-Perspective Preference Optimization

NAACL 2025long

The emergence of Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has alleviated the issues of outdated and hallucinatory content in the generation of large language models (LLMs), yet it still reveals numerous limitations. When a general-purpose LLM serves as the RAG generator, it often suffers from inadequate…

2025

Reasoning-to-Defend: Safety-Aware Reasoning Can Defend Large Language Models from Jailbreaking

EMNLP 2025

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have recently demonstrated impressive performances across diverse domains. However, how the safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) benefits from enhanced reasoning capabilities against jailbreak queries remains unexplored. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose R

2025

Retrieval Models Aren’t Tool-Savvy: Benchmarking Tool Retrieval for Large Language Models

ACL 2025finding

Tool learning aims to augment large language models (LLMs) with diverse tools, enabling them to act as agents for solving practical tasks. Due to the limited context length of tool-using LLMs, adopting information retrieval (IR) models to select useful tools from large toolsets is a critical initial…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Task Knowledge Injection via Interpolations and Reinstatement for Large Language Model Generalization

ACL 2025finding

Large language models have shown tremendous potential across various NLP tasks, and instruction tuning has been widely adopted to elicit their superior performance. However, instruction tuning may overly tailor the models to task-specific formats, potentially compromising their generalization on uns…

2024

ATM: Adversarial Tuning Multi-agent System Makes a Robust Retrieval-Augmented Generator

EMNLP 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) are proven to benefit a lot from retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in alleviating hallucinations confronted with knowledge-intensive questions. RAG adopts information retrieval techniques to inject external knowledge from semantic-relevant documents as input contexts.…

2024

Improving the Robustness of Large Language Models via Consistency Alignment

COLING 2024main

Large language models (LLMs) have shown tremendous success in following user instructions and generating helpful responses. Nevertheless, their robustness is still far from optimal, as they may generate significantly inconsistent responses due to minor changes in the verbalized instructions. Recent…

2024

KnowTuning: Knowledge-aware Fine-tuning for Large Language Models

EMNLP 2024main

Despite their success at many natural language processing (NLP) tasks, large language models still struggle to effectively leverage knowledge for knowledge-intensive tasks, manifesting limitations such as generating incomplete, non-factual, or illogical answers. These limitations stem from inadequat…

2024

Knowing What LLMs DO NOT Know: A Simple Yet Effective Self-Detection Method

NAACL 2024long

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks.However, recent literature reveals that LLMs hallucinate intermittently, which impedes their reliability for further utilization. In this paper, we propose a novel self-detection method to detect which…

2024

Learning to Use Tools via Cooperative and Interactive Agents

EMNLP 2024finding

Tool learning empowers large language models (LLMs) as agents to use external tools and extend their utility. Existing methods employ one single LLM-based agent to iteratively select and execute tools, thereafter incorporating execution results into the next action prediction. Despite their progress…

Cited by 24SourcePDFScholar
2024

MAIR: A Massive Benchmark for Evaluating Instructed Retrieval

EMNLP 2024main

Recent information retrieval (IR) models are pre-trained and instruction-tuned on massive datasets and tasks, enabling them to perform well on a wide range of tasks and potentially generalize to unseen tasks with instructions. However, existing IR benchmarks focus on a limited scope of tasks, making…

2024

Retrieving, Rethinking and Revising: The Chain-of-Verification Can Improve Retrieval Augmented Generation

EMNLP 2024finding

Recent Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) aims to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating extensive knowledge retrieved from external sources. However, such approach encounters some challenges: Firstly, the original queries may not be suitable for precise retrieval, resulting in erro…

Cited by 4SourcePDFScholar
2023

DiQAD: A Benchmark Dataset for Open-domain Dialogue Quality Assessment

EMNLP 2023long findings

Dialogue assessment plays a critical role in the development of open-domain dialogue systems. Existing work are uncapable of providing an end-to-end and human-epistemic assessment dataset, while they only provide sub-metrics like coherence or the dialogues are conversed between annotators far from r…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents

EMNLP 2023long main

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization across various language-related tasks, including search engines. However, existing work utilizes the generative ability of LLMs for Information Retrieval (IR) rather than direct passage ranking. The discrepancy betwe…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2023

Learning to Tokenize for Generative Retrieval

NeurIPS 2023poster

As a new paradigm in information retrieval, generative retrieval directly generates a ranked list of document identifiers (docids) for a given query using generative language models (LMs). How to assign each document a unique docid (denoted as document tokenization) is a critical problem, because it…

Cited by 112SourcePDFScholar
2021

Element Intervention for Open Relation Extraction

ACL 2021long

Open relation extraction aims to cluster relation instances referring to the same underlying relation, which is a critical step for general relation extraction. Current OpenRE models are commonly trained on the datasets generated from distant supervision, which often results in instability and makes…

2021

Knowledgeable or Educated Guess? Revisiting Language Models as Knowledge Bases

ACL 2021long

Previous literatures show that pre-trained masked language models (MLMs) such as BERT can achieve competitive factual knowledge extraction performance on some datasets, indicating that MLMs can potentially be a reliable knowledge source. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous study to explore the unde…

2021

Progressive Adversarial Learning for Bootstrapping: A Case Study on Entity Set Expansion

EMNLP 2021main

Bootstrapping has become the mainstream method for entity set expansion. Conventional bootstrapping methods mostly define the expansion boundary using seed-based distance metrics, which heavily depend on the quality of selected seeds and are hard to be adjusted due to the extremely sparse supervisio…